Saturday Night Live’s Darrell Hammond Talks About Death Threats, Les Misérables, the Impressions He Can’t Get out of His Head, and How Lorne Michae...

Darrell Hammond joined Saturday Night Live in 1995, as part of a rebuilding-year cast whose other newcomers included Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri. Of that group, it was Hammond who ended up staying the longest—fourteen seasons, a record that would stand until Kenan Thompson clocked in for his fifteenth season in 2017. Hammond was the show's go-to impressionist during his SNL tenure; although he played everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Walt Disney at least once, he had a particularly well-tuned eye and ear for older-white-guy anchorman types (Ted Koppel, Robert Osborne, Lou Dobbs, Dan Rather, Phil Donahue, Walter Cronkite, Tim Russert, Tom Brokaw, Wolf Blitzer, etc.) and politicians and heads of state (George W. Bush, Al Gore, Richard Nixon, John McCain, Jimmy Carter, Jesse Helms, Rudolph Giuliani, and Iraqi foreign minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, among countless others.)

He was also the second SNL cast member to play Donald Trump, who'd been played on occasion by Phil Hartman in the 1990s, and held on to the role until honorary SNL cast member and professional Trump irritant Alec Baldwin took it over in 2016 (which led to the president himself tweeting "Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater talent!” in response to some of Baldwin's work on the show.)

Hammond left SNL in 2009, but returned to take over for Don Pardo as the show’s announcer after Pardo’s death in 2014. In this conversation, conducted during the reporting process for the GQ feature “Saturday Night Forever,” Hammond discusses the inspiration he took from Eddie Murphy as a young comedian, the mortal terror of the SNL audition process, how Lorne Michaels delivers bad news, and the pain of carefully crafting impressions the world will never get to see.

Darrell Hammond: The key moment was the first time I saw Eddie Murphy. [That was] the first time I saw someone who did what I was trying to do, but was funny. I was starting out—I was trying to learn how to be funny. I was doing clubs, driving around the country, trying to learn how to do stand-up.

And Eddie Murphy was already funny. He was a great impressionist. I realized, That's what I want to be in life. I don't know if I'll ever be as good as him, but that's where I'm going. That's true north for me now. And I always studied him over the years and sort of felt like he was the Willie Mays of performance art. I mean, it's nothing he can't do as well or better than everyone, but for being funny while being transformative, it was Eddie Murphy. And that kind of defined who I was going to be, moving forward.

He would tell his jokes in his own voice, and then he would perform the punchline in character. And that's what I wanted to be. That's the only way I knew how to be funny. I didn't know how to tell jokes in my own voice yet. I got better at it over the years, and better at monologues over the years. But he was the template.

I wanted to be a performer. I'd done acting, I'd done Off Broadway. I'd done stuff—but it wasn't until I saw him, I was like, That's it. Now I'm not meandering around anymore. And later when I was on the cast, I got a chance to do a sketch with Dana [Carvey], and Dana was my second inspiration. My second muse. I used to have Hirschfeld drawings in my office. He's the great caricaturist from days of yore.

It's one thing to be able to do impressions. It's another thing to be able to do impressions on Saturday Night Live—meaning, to get that laugh, to do a funny impression. And Dana italicized his impressions. And when I started doing that after having done a sketch with him my first year on the show, that's when I locked myself in, as a potential cast member for a while, I hoped.

[Dana]’s George Bush Sr. seems more like George Senior than the real guy. If you look at the Hirschfeld drawings, you see Kate Hepburn's nose isn't really that big, but the drawings of Kate Hepburn look more like Kate Hepburn than a photograph does. So that was the art form I was trying to pick up from Dana and Eddie.

Well, it would be impossible, from a brain like mine, which is not given to self-promotion very easily, to conclude that I had scored or that I had advanced my cause, because there's no sound. There's no sound. It's just this very, very famous man in this very, very famous place, and you're doing your funniest and best stuff and he's not responding. What I do remember walking away from it was that I didn't choke. I didn't choke. I performed as well as I thought I could perform. Didn't know if that was going to get me anywhere, but I realized that I didn't choke and it was incredibly important to me because when I first walked in there, I thought I would just turn around and walk right back out. It was too scary.

The Stones played to my left and [Lorne Michaels is] sitting there and he could not be more unengaged. The fact is, he's incredibly engaged. He's studying. But I was like, Can't there be some laughs? Nope. So maybe I didn't get the show, but I know I didn't choke. And I had been warned it was a terrifying prospect. So I was preparing myself for something like that. But nothing could really prepare you for walking into that studio the first time and seeing that man sitting there and he says, "You're ready?" And you fumble all over yourself and trip and do a Jerry Lewis fall into the bandstand.

But I didn't choke, and then it happened again. Came back for another one of those. No laughs. And the funny thing is, you're walking out of the theater in the high spot of your life's prime, and you're seeing lots of other people in the building going about their day in a casual manner. Backstage at SNL— there were sound people back there, there were makeup people and hair people back there, and they've got that slightly bored look of someone who's going through a long workday. And they don't stop you and go, "Hey, that was great." It was the most important moment of my life. Nothing. And I walked out there going, "At least I didn't choke."

No one's going to tell you. And when you think about a place like that—that's what they do there. They hit home runs. All day long, home runs—left field, right field, center field, rough, inside the park, homers, homers, homers, homers. Emmys, Emmys, Emmys. Everywhere. So you would stand out if you didn't do well, but I thought about that afterwards. I was like, "These fucking people. They're the very best in the world, they're used to it. Oh, I get it. Yeah." Well, I ain't used to it. It scared the bejesus out of me.

I do. I got a call from my manager, my agent at the time. And you know when you get a call from your manager and agent at the same time, it means it bodes well, or poorly, but something momentous is about to happen. And I got the show. I was with my wife, we had like $100 or something, $150, and I did what at that time was the greatest way to spend an evening, to me, [which] was to go see Les Misérables. I probably saw it 30 times over the years. We went to see Les Mis, because walking on air is pretty hard to describe, but that's about what it was like for a few hours.

Yeah. I remember going into the office. There was a part that I really wanted to play. He held forth on daisies and why he thought that was a beautiful plant. And I walked out of there, realized that I didn't get the part, but I couldn't remember which part of the conversation that had occurred [in]. We really did talk about daisies, but I left there with no wound. I had just gotten a complete no and a final no.

He really does soften the blow when he can. He really does make an effort to soften the blow. But he reminds me of that coach that used to coach for Alabama, Nick Saban. I mean, the guy really tried hard for his players, but when it was time to deliver bad news, that's what you got. But he really seemed to be trying hard to soften the blow. And did.

Adam McKay wrote a sketch for me and Chris Parnell, who was playing Newt Gingrich, and we sang and danced in it, and I believe we made out at the end. I can't move at all—even in my most athletic years playing ball in high school, I just wasn't a deft, graceful person, I was very clunky. But there I was, swinging around a lamppost with Chris Parnell doing some clumsy form of dance that served Adam's piece. I always loved doing an Adam McKay piece. I mean, people like Adam McKay and Tina Fey are writing this stuff.

I remember one time Tina Fey wrote this piece for me, and I think it was Dick Cheney speaking Pig Latin, and I was a little under the weather and I was having trouble mastering it. But I remember thinking to myself, "All I have to do is say this. Just go out there and let the audience be clear on what you just said." But it was like that all through the years. I was being propped up by all those people that won all those Emmys, and then I would go out there and do my little part and hopefully not stink up the joint.

I was playing Clinton.

I mean, yeah, “Opposites Attract.” That was the name of the song. I guess they joined forces on something. When you get down to it, opposites attract. [Sings] You're the wrong to my right. You made it fun to fight, live from New York it's Saturday Night. Yeah, love to get in there and fake like I could carry a tune. But that was fun.

I've never seen anyone define for me, and really capture for me and explain to me, what happens there. I was flying over the Grand Canyon one time and I wanted to take a picture outside my window and someone said, "You can forget it. You won't get it." Take the picture. But you're not going to capture that. And I feel it's the same way—it’s too hard to describe a place where LeBron James and George W. Bush and Barack Obama used the same bathroom and might walk by your little dressing room and say “Hi.” You know what I mean?

I don't know that I can find one. I remember sitting in my dressing room and those people would walk by. I remember one day—if you leave Studio 8H and take a left and you walk about 100 feet and take another left and walk about 25 or 50 feet, you'll pass Belushi's dressing room. You'll pass the hair and makeup center, and there's a bathroom that cast members use, and I was walking down the hall and there I saw Sarah Palin walking towards me. She's like, "Bathroom?" And I wanted to say, "Not that one. Okay? That's a rush bathroom. Okay? That's a pit stop bathroom. That's [a] ‘people running up and down stairs with papers and mugs of coffee’ bathroom. There's a little nicer one down the hall that Hillary goes to. You might want to try that one."

I was like, "Don't go in there." Because right then I go, Did I sprinkle when I tinkle? I mean, I'm in a rush. Did I wipe the seat off? And stuff like that would be happening all the time. People walking up to you and you're like, “Why are you—? What—?”

Yeah. You’re getting resentful. Why am I thinking about this? Damn. But I mean, you walk down the hall, there's a llama. There's Nicole Kidman. Hey, that's Tom Cruise. Is that Cam Newton? Hey, LeBron just walked by. Walk a little further down the hall and you see the Manning brothers and dad, the three of them just standing there shooting the shit. That's what I mean when I say I don't know exactly how to describe that. I don't know how to describe Mount Rushmore that well.

We did the New York Magazine shoot recently, and I had that same odd feeling. Like Wow, you got to be a little impressed with yourself if you're here. I don't have a high opinion of myself, but I felt like, Well, I must've done something right if I'm in the room with all these folks, because these are all folks that I would want to be.

It's interesting that you heard that many comments about Eddie Murphy as well.

He's changing himself to become funny.

I think the greatest performance I ever gave was when there were no cue cards and I was doing Tony Soprano at the Bada Bing, and Molly Shannon was playing the 50-year-old dancer. And for the first 30 to 45 seconds, there were no cue cards. And I'd never done Tony Soprano before—but I didn't panic. I sat there and did Marlon Brando for about 15 seconds. It was the best I could do, man. I was parachuting. Let's face it.

No, it's a live show and stuff doesn't go right frequently. I mean, that's not all that was going on. I had pancake in my mouth. I had glue in my eye. I had just done a sketch not three minutes earlier. I was someone else, and I literally had swallowed pancake and my eye was partially glued shut. No cards. Brand new and very difficult impression for me. You have to look it up sometime. It's an amazing sketch. It's one of Molly's finest hours. But you'll see me scrambling and you’ll go, He didn’t panic. There's an old wives’ tale that that's why you audition for Lorne under those really daunting circumstance,s because he knows that [eventually] you're going to get on the air and a scaffold is going to fall or a set won't show up or the cue cards won't show. I mean, it's live. It's a hive of activity and everyone's buzzing, buzzing, buzzing.

There was a sketch—I don't want to say the name of the sketch, because that'll [tell you] the name of the host, but there was a sketch that I'd worked on really hard and the host decided they wanted to sing a Christmas carol in the open. The idea had come to her mom between dress and air, and that put me out of about 60 hours of work. I'm not going to tell you who it is. I don't want to give that away. I understood that's the risk of working in a place like that where the host has tons and tons of power. There's something else I was going to tell you, but I can't remember right now. What’s the next question?

Yeah, it's the one I just told you about.

Yeah, man. I mean, I was working. I had a pretty mean Geraldo going there. I'd really been working on Geraldo, saying the word “Mogadishu” all week—“Mogadishu” and
“dastardly.” I mean, eventually the sketch got on in another form, but not with the script that I was so in love with.

Well, think about it—what percentage of your efforts succeed? Very few. I mean, it's a show where you can be on one time per show and if you score during that one time, it's the same as five times. And the men are standing there. Fox-nosed men peering over the tops of newspapers, going How’s my money being spent here? They don't care that the host wanted to sing a Christmas carol. It's a lot of pressure. And then towards the end of my time there on the show, there were death threats. Imagine that.

The first one was about Clinton. The second one, I wasn't really sure what that one was about. The first one was a direct threat, but the second one was not as clear. The person that was arrested had phony credentials, and that was even creepier, because a pro had been sent. It wasn't just some person who couldn't tell the difference between me and Bill Clinton literally, but to me, people don't really realize you're playing a politician on that show. You're probably entering and leaving the building the same way the president does. You're probably underground. And that finally wore on me. My final night, I was supposed to do Speaker Hastert and I had just had another person arrested, and maybe I could go out and bulldoze my way through a tackling dummy with all my pent-up anxiety. But striking that exact note on the fiddle at the exact time you need to is a precision game.

So when I speak of SNL impressions of what people do, I'm factoring in the degree of difficulty. It's not going to be a Vegas tribute act—marvelous as they are, I enjoy them as much as anybody, but man, it ain't going to be like that. You have a lot of obstacles, and Paul McCartney is going to be standing there. I'm getting ready to do this sketch and Paul McCartney, why does he have to be here? And A-Rod is there with somebody and they're all standing there and they're 30 feet from you. And I'm like, Paul McCartney? I remember I was doing “Update,” I forget who the host was at the time, but I turned to them and said, "Why does he have to be here? I'm scared now.” You know what I mean?

Yeah, why is there a Beatle here? I've never done this character before. Every media outlet in however many English-speaking countries there are in the world is watching as well. And the president. Y’know?

That's tough stuff. I think finally I just gave up trying to comprehend [it.] It’s like trying to comprehend the moon, trying to comprehend gravity, trying to comprehend incomprehensible things, I just gave up trying. All I knew was you cannot panic. I panicked in my first sketch, and boy, that's something I won't ever do again. Proving that you can control your emotions, but my first sketch was Ted Koppel. It wasn't funny and I was petrified and my brain had a come-to-Jesus talk with me afterwards. Like, Brother, you need to make up your mind. Because bombing here has impossible, impossible consequences. And yet there was one time that I did. A couple times, actually. Couldn't be avoided. It's a live show, man.

You're quarreling with yourself. How does Bobby Knight make his “A” sounds and his “B” sounds, and how does Bobby Knight say “U” and “O”? And you're thinking about all that stuff and then you're on the air and it's possible to get knocked off your horse in a place like that. That's what happened to me that night, with Bobby Knight.

I was telling someone: I walked out in front of those cameras a thousand times, and every single time it was the high wire without a net. Every time. Sometimes when I do sets out here in Los Angeles, I'm not feeling well or something's going on, and somehow I manage to go out and have a good set. You don't feel good? Suck it up. I don't know why I compared Lorne Michaels with Coach Saban, but they're both the best in the world at what they do. But suck it up, brother. You're tired? You're not tired today. Am I making sense?

You know. In your job—you’re not feeling it today, you don’t get to show up and dick off.

The prose is a little choppy today, Alex…

It's an all night affair.

That's why there's couches in all the offices, man. You get 40 winks, 10 winks, five winks, whatever you can get. Lay down and just shut your eyes for a second. Because the sleep won't come regularly, and it won't come when you need it or when you want it. I don't know how many times I walked out of there and said, "I'm too tired. I'm too tired. Why did I think I was funny? Why did I want to be funny? What am I doing?" And then the light comes on and you're like, "Dude." What do they say in that show Lioness, when they're getting ready to go on the mission? "Strap up. Do it."

I'll tell you something I've told people, because I don't know how to describe it—I'm stretching, I'm exaggerating to make a point, but not by much, and that is if you're not prepared to lose a thumb, if you're not prepared to lose a digit, if you're not playing with that sort of reckless abandon, you might not survive the hardships of the week. Think about what you have to learn in 48 hours, right?

Next week it's going to be new.

Yeah. I eventually came up with a system to break all these [characters] down quickly, and I know that I put some out there that were out there because they were good enough to be funny, and I'm disappointed because I knew I was never going to do them again. I knew I might not ever do Brit Hume again, and I didn't do it as well as I wanted to do it. It was okay, got through it all right, but I really wanted to make a meal out of that one, and there's just no time and never went back. When I think about that, it haunts me a little bit.

Just that there wasn't time to make it as good as I wanted it to be. I remember I saw Brit Hume's wife at the vice president's mansion a few weeks later. I don't think she was too pleased with what I put out there. I was like, "Oh man, come on. This is a magic act. You don't understand that this is all but impossible under these conditions." Come on.

I'm like, "Lady, I had five hours to learn a world-class journalist. I thought I did pretty well."

That's the million-dollar question. Someone from Lorne's office who'd come to the party with me, [SNL and 30 Rock producer] Lindsay Shookus, went over and engaged Mrs. Hume in conversation, and soon all was well. But I was standing there going, "Hey wait. Hey man, come on. You don't know how hard it is." I was about to launch into that, but she thankfully saved me.

The best part was scoring in that theater. I mean, there's no experience I've had—and, I mean, I was on Broadway, and the reviews said I was pretty good. Did pretty well on Broadway, it was great. But killing on Saturday Night Live is not describable. I mean, it's crack. If drugs are your thing, this is crack. This is unreal. So there's that, and then there's the failures. There's the ones where I just didn't have time, but the idea there was, people don't take this into consideration. The idea there was We need it right now. We need it in five hours. Is it good enough to do the bit? Because we're doing something topical, we have to do the story. You see what I mean?

Yeah. They probably come up to you and go, "I need 2,500 words now."

Yeah. We're doing the story. We have to do the story. You have to do the story. Is it good enough? Unless it's trash, we're going to put it out there. So people go, "Man, his Brit Hume wasn't that great." It’s like, "Man, it was good enough to get out there. It was good enough to get a laugh." And then I have to say to myself, It wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but mission accomplished. They laughed where they wanted them to laugh, so mission accomplished. But that would be the worst part is putting a character out there that's half-baked.

But then on the other hand, you have to bring up Jim Downey at the end of the day. When you think about best experiences—I had done Al Gore 300 times at the Comedy Cellar over two years. I mean, at that time I was going up about 150 times, 200 times a year. So I've done Gore 300 times and never got a laugh. And we did, we even had me on “Weekend Update.” They gave it a try on “Weekend Update”. I couldn't get a laugh. That's because Gore wore the mantle of, Nice guy, works hard, does well.

No one knew that much about him. That's what they knew of him. Nice guy, works hard, does well. When the debates came out, the 2000 debates, the Gore-Bush debates, I was in my dressing room at four o'clock and I did not have a new Gore. I had the one that I'd done 300 times in the Village. Downey walks in and says, "Listen to me. I know I don't normally do this, but I'm going to give you line readings." I'm like, "Please, God, give me line readings—please." So he came up with this syrupy, overbearing schoolteacher [delivery for Gore.] You talk about finding the handle. He found the handle, and that's how we played him. Although he didn't really talk like that. Nor does Dana's Bush Sr. really talk like that—but they do. He found the thing I couldn't find in 300 efforts, and that happened a number of times.

Yeah. Yeah. It's that one. It's an overbearing schoolteacher trying to explain, a little clumsily, to the student. Really over-explaining. I remember this guy from The Sopranos who ran into me in a bar one night. He said, "I listen to you. I listen to Al Gore—the two are not the same." I'm like, "No, they're not, are they?" He says "Yes, you're getting the laughs, but the two are not the same." I was like, "I know—I'm trying to be funny, you fuckface."

I mean, there was a dinner with James Gandolfini that I never would've gotten. Stuff like that. Those are little tidbits you think back and go, "Wow, that was pretty fucking cool."

I can tell you're well-versed on your subject.

You have mountains of information that will really occupy space in your brain for a while. Even after you're done with it and you don't need it, it's still going to be there.

I can't get that out of my head.

I just did this. I learned how to do Ed McMahon for Jerry Seinfeld's movie about Pop Tarts, and I really, really went to town. I really made it elaborate, and I worked with him on it. And then I saw the edited cut. I'm like, "Boy, okay. Bare bones. All right.”

SNL50: The Anniversary Special airs at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on Sunday, February 16, on NBC and Peacock. To read all of GQ’s coverage of Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary, click here.